Making co-existent and convergent the need for efficiency of relational query processing
over Clouds and the security of data themselves is figuring-out how one of the most
challenging research problems in the Big Data era. Indeed, in actual analytics-oriented engines,
such as Google Analytics and Amazon S3, where key-value storage-representation and efficientmanagement
models are employed as to cope with the simultaneous processing of billions of
transactions, querying encrypted data is becoming one of the most annoying problem, which has
also attracted a great deal of attention from the research community. While this issue has been
applied to a large variety of data formats, e.g. relational, RDF and multidimensional data, very
few initiatives have pointed-out skyline query processing over encrypted data, which is, indeed,
relevant for database analytics. In order to fulfill this methodological and technological gap, in
this paper we present eSkyline, a prototype system and query interface that enables the processing
of skyline queries over encrypted data, even without preserving the order on each attribute
as order-preserving encryption would do. Our system comprises of an encryption scheme that
facilitates the evaluation of domination relationships, hence allows for state-of-the-art skyline
processing algorithms to be used. In order to prove the effectiveness and the reliability of our
system, we also provide the details of the underlying encryption scheme, plus a suitable GUI
that allows a user to interact with a server, and showcases the efficiency of computing skyline
queries and decrypting the results.
